Edgar in "King Lear," and had he been left to die a maniac, would that, think you, have been untrue to fact?
Even the one or two to whom Fate has been most propitious, a Shakespeare, a Goethe, have not they too suffered from the bruises or flattery of Fortune, fallen at any rate far short of the fullness and balance a happier age and education might have conducted them to?
People are indeed fond of raising monuments and holding centenaries (to the so-called honor!) of great men, but do you think there is any significance at the bottom of it? Very little indeed. The fathers kill the prophets, and the sons garnish their sepulchres.
In the face of these facts and considerations how disgusting to hear the universal cant about "public opinion!" The shoemaker's opinion may indeed have some value on the matter of boots, the tailor's on that of clothes; but what opinion can the masses, all absorbed in the question of simple existence, have about government and education and religion? At best they are capable of a total heart-belief in names, of dying as martyrs for names. Dean Stanley admits that most of the noble martyrdoms have been in attestation of peculiar combinations of letters of the alphabet. See the intellect and heart of Scotland wrangling, down into the latter end of the nineteenth century (and into how many later centuries?), as to whether little children at school shall learn how to define effectual calling and distinguish between justification, adoption, and sanctification!
And all men shall be immortal? Each despicable unit must needs be an immortal and independent soul? Came from God? And God sends by special appointment such swarms of immortal souls, often in such questionable way, sinto the world? And if you are really eternal the one way, before, you must also be so the other way, behind? What, then, of your being a thousand years ago? And you do seem to carry the air of eternity about you, sleeping and digesting and pottering about nothing as you do! Is not each individual man, according to Darwin and Haeckel, but the temporary inheritor and transmitter of the qualities of his ancestors, modified by the impressions received during his own tenure of life from intercourse with people, reading, etc.? And how can the self-same life be held at one and the same time by each individual successive link in an endless chain, seeing the life devolves but in succession, and that each link in the chain sparkles into existence and luminousness only during the short term of actual possession?
It is no use arguing that men are left to their own free-wills, and have themselves to blame for their fates, when the whole complaint is simply that men have no free-wills to be left to, but are total slaves. And yet not a poor devil desecrating the earth but, under very possible circumstances, through a kinder providence and better influences, might have been saved in the first place from being born a devil. Where, then, is the moral government of the world, the ideal tendency
